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Tinder, the dating app for people who hate dating apps, has shown a stubborn desire to expand beyond its “hookup” reputation. In April, cofounders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen voiced intentions to extend the app’s matchmaking technology into business networking. Today the company introduced Matchmaker, a feature that it hopes will subtly broaden users’ perspectives on the app.

Accessed via the normal Tinder app, Matchmaker allows users to introduce their friends to each other. Just select two friends, add a message and press send. If that sounds like an innovation worthy of a groan, consider the status quo.

Email introductions generally work just fine for business, but if you're doing them correctly you have to get permission before giving up a colleague's email address. Matchmaker, the company argues, keeps sensitive contact information out of reach. For romantic introductions meanwhile, email doesn't make any sense. Just giving away someone's phone number rarely feels right, and looping everyone into a group text doesn't quite work either. Of course there's the old-fashioned method of wrangling everyone together for an in-person meetup--it worked just fine for your parents--but that's just so analog. This is 2013 people.

"Right now introductions are a very difficult process," explains Rad, Tinder's 27 year-old CEO. "They're slow, they're socially awkward. This is socially a acceptable environment for you to make introductions in an easy way."

Though Rad admits that he has no idea if the feature will catch on or not, the company has been testing Matchmaker with 100 users for a month. Rad says that he expected about 10% of the test population to make introductions, with the other 90% benefiting from the connections. Instead, nearly all of the users have made multiple introductions.

"It feels good if I introduce you to a girl and you guys hook up. Whether it will be widely used we don't know yet," says Rad.

Such introductions aren't limited to Tinder users. People can use Matchmaker to connect any of their Facebook friends. Those who don't have Tinder receive a Facebook message prompting them to download the app and get chatting with their match. Obviously, there are some growth benefits here as well.

Not that growth has historically been a problem for the company. Though the company won’t release user numbers, Rad says that 50 million matches have been made over the service since its release last September, and 4.7 billion profiles have been rated. That's up from 35 million and 3.5 billion when I last spoke to the company in six weeks ago.

Rad hopes that the feature will extend beyond romantic and become a useful tool for making any kind of connection. Cofounder and CMO Mateen introduced him to a guy who could get him a good deal on a watch, he says, while he's found Matchmaker particularly helpful in integrating new hires into the company.

Yet Tinder remains intimately associated with hookups and dating. Some people even mistake it for a straight version of Grindr, an app with a reputation for facilitating quick, discrete hookups. How can Tinder make a transition into a business networking tool, or even just a broad-use networking tool, without a rebrand?

"It's a very, very tricky transition," Rad says. "I'm not worried so much about the branding. We haven't pigeonholed ourselves in the name or the messaging or anything. What we've developed a reputation for is that it works."

"You know that we deliver on the process of meeting someone new," he says. "It's a very natural extension to say 'We've been doing that for relationships. Now we're going to start doing that for your business life.'"

I was about to counter with the Tinder homepage, which once displayed attractive, half-dressed twenty-somethings standing next to each other, but it seems the company is one step ahead. They've already toned down the sexuality.